Sonic Youth’s ninth full-length – or tenth including The Whitey Album – 1995’s Washing Machine, marks the transitional moment where New York’s noise-punk cornerstones process the upheavals of the previous couple of years and map out the new territory they’d explore during the rest of their career. The handful of albums immediately preceding it had found them toying with Big Rock Moves commensurate with their newfound status as major label signees. Since their inception in 1981, Sonic Youth had pulled apart the rock paradigm for punk thrills and intellectual satisfaction – detuning and adulterating their guitars, playing power-drills through pick-ups – while also slyly referencing that paradigm: their scarifying Halloween masterpiece Bad Moon Rising stole its title off Credence Clearwater Revival, while 1988’s Daydream Nation was a gatefold double with runes on the labels that closed on a three-part epic, like a true prog artefact.
Sonic Youth rode this duality better than any of their peers, all the way to a peachy record deal with DGC Records in 1990, and leaned into it hard with their major debut, Goo. They toured with Neil Young, a bittersweet experience that won them the ire of his fans and road crew but also ignited his turn-of-the-decade renaissance. And for all their closer alliance to classic rock song-form, any calls of “sellout” were dashed in as long as it took the abstract noise blast of ‘Scooter + Jinx’ to cleanse the aural palate. Anyway, the thought of a group as rooted in the grimy subterranea that birthed them crossing over was laughable.
Late into promotional duties for Goo, their protégés, labelmates and occasional support act Nirvana, tore through the membranous barrier that separated underground and overground, and that joke wasn’t funny anymore. Months later, Sonic Youth found themselves recording Goo’s follow-up with producer Butch Vig and mixer Andy Wallace, the dream-team that massaged Nevermind into a multi-platinum product. And while it’s hard to imagine Sonic Youth coveted the success of their Seattle brethren or even considered it within their reach, as a sonic object Dirty hewed closer to the ‘alt_rock’ sound Nirvana et al were then coining, even as its text subverted the still-prevailing orthodoxy. The group eased into roles as scene-elders and, recognising the Big Rock Moves as a creative dead-end, they decisively u-turned with 1994’s lo-fi, riot grrl-sympathetic Experimental, Jet Set, Trash And No Star, an intimate, personal, challenging artwork arriving when at a moment when many of their contemporaries were sanding away such edges in order to better kiss the corporate-rock ring.
Then the rollercoaster vacated the tracks. Cobain died, darkness descended, and the dream they’d been half-heartedly toying with soured forever.
That’s how Sonic Youth found themselves in Memphis, Tennessee during the first half of 1995, reeling, grieving and asking themselves where they could go next. Washing Machine is the answer, and it is one of their very greatest records.
They were to some extent alienated from the corporate rock world they had flirted with and then been entrapped by in recent years. While writing the new material, they’d been tapped by R.E.M. as potential support act for the mammoth world tour for Monster. Sonic Youth agreed – but, initially, only if they could perform under a new name: Washing Machine. “Kids were just buying brand names,” guitarist Thurston Moore reasoned to Music Week. “Sonic Youth is a brand name, so we’d change it, just as a political gesture.” Cooler heads prevailed, however; “We’ve got a baby, and you gotta pay the rent,” bassist Kim Gordon told Rolling Stone. “So we’re compromising and calling the new record Washing Machine.”
Still, the sessions for the record – and the music that arose from them – signalled a group seeking to transcend the alt_rock universe in which they found themselves penned. The constantly underrated Experimental Jet Set nonetheless sounded like the record a major label signing would make to test the boundaries of their patrons’ patience, tapping the guy who helped Nirvana sell 6m albums to make a record that sounded like it was recorded in a cupboard by amateurs. It was a reaction, to Nevermind, to the machismo of major label grunge, to Dirty, even.
But the music of Washing Machine is something else – less a reaction than a peeling off to find a new vocabulary, a pathway of its own. The group rearranged their sonic set-up on the album. The bass guitar is often absent, Gordon preferring instead to play third guitar, a down-tuned Gibson, mapping out a new sound removed from the MTV 120 Minutes waters they had previously been slumming in. The references and influences are strikingly European; Moore said the group were immersed in “Neu! and Can and those early-70s German drone-rock bands” while writing and recording. “We purposely wrote this material without worrying about editing it too much,” he added. The album inaugurated a process that would reach its apotheosis across the albums that followed: the jammy, Grateful Dead-indebted A Thousand Leaves, the exploratory and conversational reveries of Murray Street. Make no mistake: this newfound looseness, this unhurried pursuit of the sonic sublime, begins here.
But this music wasn’t merely cerebral, or experimental for its own sake. The genius twist of Washing Machine is that its excursive, space rock sounds were married to songwriting grounded in the band-members’ lives – that unlikely rollercoaster they’d been living the last couple of years. It wasn’t always explicit – ‘Unwind’, a rich, languid, gently psychedelic unfurling which foregrounded the interlocking triple-guitar sound Sonic Youth would explore from this point forth, was a lullaby about blissful escape. But it’s hard not to conclude that ‘Junkie’s Blues’ was inspired, at least in part, by Cobain’s addiction; the chorus hook, “I hate myself / But I love everybody else”, partly echoes Nirvana’s aborted title for what became In Utero: I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. That Moore’s depiction of the titular junkie’s sorrowful experience is so tender, so sympathetic and so without judgment seems to confirm this. The loss of Cobain would be an unthinkable tragedy for Sonic Youth, one they invested in this music, to make sense of it, to place it somewhere it couldn’t hurt them so bad.
Gordon’s contributions to Washing Machine were stellar. She’d closed Experimental Jet Set – which saw her step into the foreground, writing and singing its strongest material – on a sublime high with ‘Sweet Shine’, a poetic, acid-kissed and incredibly moving snapshot of a mother-daughter relationship, written by a woman about to become a mother herself. The songs she contributed to Washing Machine maintained this skyward velocity. Her vocals on the murmured blues of opener ‘Becuz’ are remarkable: half-asleep, erotic, scourging, keening and impenetrable. ‘Little Trouble Girl’ was nothing short of magical, revisiting the environs of ‘Sweet Shine’ but as if rewritten by Brill Building songsmiths, with co-writer Kim Deal delivering incandescent harmonies. A sliver of perfect pop amid the kosmische jamming, it’s incredibly moving, Gordon’s deadpan delivery like Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las.
As with her work on Experimental Jet Set, Gordon’s lyrics here are working on a level of subtlety and nuance that would be undone by clumsy precis. The album’s title track toys with materialism, feminism, self-possession and love, its narrative unclear but stirring. The music is astonishing, its nervy, trebly opening section giving way to an elegant, chugging groove, one that reminds us Sonic Youth were spending their nights-off at Memphian blues and R&B joints. Then the third and final section, where the guitars cease to operate within a realm charted by notes but rather dealing more in pure texture. From halfway through the song, Moore (in the right channel) switches from mutant-blues vamping, to booming raga tones, before being engulfed by distortion. As Gordon strums the rhythm and guitarist Lee Ranaldo ekes out shrieks of feedback, Moore’s fuzz-toned and wah-tethered guitar opens wider and wider. It’s a truly psychedelic moment, one that reminds me of an old friend’s description of being stoned as being like a bubble rising up through your body and popping inside your head. Moore’s screeching buzz ascends in frequency, before unhurriedly dipping again, the four musicians backing back down from this moment of furious intensity to another intimate musical conversation it feels like we’re eavesdropping.
The album closed with another epic, perhaps their greatest song. Five years earlier, while opening for Neil Young on their ill-fated tour together, the grizzled ‘godfather of grunge’ described the track the group closed with every night, ‘Expressway To Yr. Skull’, as “incredibly good, so beautiful – a classic”. Young would be inspired by the track – and its epic closing whiteout – to foray deeper into feedback himself, with Crazy Horse, on Arc, an album composed of amp-noise he’d recorded on that tour. ‘The Diamond Sea’, Washing Machine’s 20-minute closing track, returns the favour. Its opening minutes sound like nothing else than the Youth channelling Neil and his Crazy Horse circa Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: a lissom, sad, hopeful melody wrapped around Moore’s high-register, fragile vocal.
Moore’s singing a tragic lullaby, about fame and hope and loneliness and alienation, of love that lasts eternally and mirrors stealing souls and little kids dressed in dreams. And it all feels so sad. I don’t think he ever said as much but it’s clearly about Cobain, at least a little, and perhaps a lot. It wasn’t his first song about the ill-fated musician – he closed his debut solo album Psychic Hearts, released that May, with the 20-minute instrumental ‘Elegy For All The Dead Rock Stars’, where the same chords endlessly repeat like water torture, before exploding into senseless atonal noise 13 minutes in, and then calming out until the fade.
Here, the Crazy Horse-esque ballad reaches a wise crescendo three minutes into a Moore guitar solo that’s wracked and haunting and, for Sonic Youth, as close to classic rock as they’ve perhaps ever gone. But this cathartic moment seems to tear open the song, and what follows is – save for a brief return to the melody and hook later on – a series of shifting, abstract passages of feedback, amplifier abuse and pedal fuckery that is beautiful, that is charged with emotion, that feels like spiritual free jazz. It feels like all the emotion, this uncontained loss and grief and anger and sadness, pouring out, so pure and untrammelled it won’t obey song-form. To some it will prove unlistenable; to others, myself included, it feels impossibly moving. I remember it splitting me in two the first time I saw Sonic Youth in 1996, on the Washing Machine tour when it arrived at north London’s The Forum. As soon as file-sharing became a thing, I’d stay up late at night downloading every bootlegged live performance of the song I could Napster or Limewire, its ever-shifting, mournful droning charged with such power, and seemingly containing something profound for the listeners hardy enough to brave its voyage.
It’s this freeform noise, tempered by more traditional song structure, that would be Sonic Youth’s chief obsession across the albums that followed. Having raised themselves up from the no wave slums, they’d helped lead the US underground to a point where dirty-haired punk kids could emerge from under their wings and change the zeitgeist. And ultimately that didn’t make Sonic Youth happy, but what did was finding space to explore with freedom, to unwind and stretch out. That summer they headlined Lollapalooza, but their performances – which often closed with then-unreleased ‘The Diamond Sea’, which must have been a headfuck – drew less media attention than the chaotic shows of second-on-the-bill Hole. It would mark their last dalliance with that straight world; in later years, you’d be more likely to find them on the bill of avant garde and leftfield festivals like All Tomorrow’s Parties.
‘The Diamond Sea’, meanwhile, opens the door to ‘Sunday’, to ‘Wildflower Soul’, to ‘Peace Attack’, to ‘Rain On Tin’, to the discursive and excursive music that would characterise the albums that followed. They would continue on this charmed, fearless path, laudably unconcerned by the material world they’d flirted with and then rejected, occasionally frustrating listeners but, more often, indulging us in the magic they could wreak whenever they truly let loose. And then, in 2011, it ended, forever, and we all just have to make our peace with that, don’t we? But we’ll always have all those albums, and for the 70 mercurial, exploratory and poignant minutes it’s playing, it’s hard not to conclude that Washing Machine is the very best of them all.
